twitter

OK, so it's been a few weeks since I started using twitter. The best uses have been suitably demonstrated by those fine folks at b3ta but I thought I'd rant my findings so far.

In it's original use as some sort of "hello, I'm on the train" - it totally fails to impress me. Why bother? I'm following a few friends, and no offence to them, but the parts of their personal lives they choose to share are um, not gripping. If I want to know what X is doing, I'd rather a) phone em up or have some other realtime converation or 2) look for a longer than 140 characters blog posting.

However where I *do* find it useful is for a day to day scratchpad of stuff I've done to gather together for my weekly report. I'm sure the public at large don't give a monkeys what I'm up to, and my use of bug #1234 no doubt screws up hashtags something rotten, but hey, for me it works.

The alternative is some sort of cgi elog thing, but the advantage of twitter is the open API that other people have already spent time working with. Twitterfox 'just works' for me.

Ho Hum, there we go, somewhat over my 140 charaters, but if you're really sad you can follow me on http://twitter.com/elwell2000, or look over on the right of the page.

Scientific Sailing

*why* can't the UK do something like this?

I remember years ago when Curly Mills kindly donated Alba Venturer to OYT Scotland we had a long discussion about how important teaching basic science / engineering was. Big plus points for the Italians for doing the Right Thing (TM).